Your Ann Coulters and Rush Limbaughs don’t like John McCain. They say it’s because he isn’t a real conservative, but I think there’s a better explanation, which is almost the opposite. The hardcore of the American right don’t like John McCain because he’s the perfect conservative candidate, and they’re jealous.

Though McCain’s often described as a war hero, I’m not aware that he did anything especially heroic. America does have strangely low expectations of its soldiers, as merely serving appears to qualify you as a hero; getting injured, which one might think a predictable hazard of being in a war, qualifies you for a medal (although, of course, nothing so extreme as good health care). But McCain’s military record does involve one thing that makes him perfect for conservatives.

The fundamental narrative of American conservatism is its increasingly ludicrous attempt to portray the conservative as the victim: suffering at the hands of the liberal media, big government, and the commies at the ACLU. In this, of course, McCain has a trump card that is all but unassailable: unlike almost every other American conservative, he really was tortured by Communists.